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linux games, chess

I self-rate myself as “computer literated”. However, unlike most of IT geeks, computer game is not on my menu. It is pity I have never got my hands wet in the computer game pond. One weekend, I asked myself, have I ever learnt a major new thing in computer stuff? The answer was no. Since I picked up unix/linux (from Red hat to fedora/ubuntun), I used to shell, sql (mysql), perl, fortran, got involved very deeply and use them daily, but non of new stuff added. I should pick up some new, A few candidates: mastering in phython etc.

Today, there is spark, linux game. Try chess. Checked out fedora, there are a few chess games. I will make a selection and share progress/frustrations.

XBoard
XBoard is a very old chess interface. It's not very fancy, or flashy, but it has all the basic features
of a modern chess program: You can play against all commonly used chess engines and connect to Internet
chess servers.
Knights
Knights is a very nice KDE chess game[1]. The last version (0.6.4-beta) was released in January of 2005.
Development seems to have stalled. It supports themes, loading and saving of games, chess engines and
Internet chess servers. It's the best chess interface available today.
Gnome-Chess
Gnome Chess is/was a GNOME chess interface which was last updated in January of 2001. It's GNU, and the
source is out there, so someone could possibly make a Gnome 2.x version and update it. It's not worth
considering if you just want to play chess.
Slibo
Slibo is a OpenGL 3D chess interface for KDE which could have turned out to be the coolest Chess engine
in the universe. The project is very dead at this point and the last version (0.4.4) was released in
August 2003. It doesn't compile against KDE 3.5, and this won't be fixed since the project is dead and
unmaintained. Again, the source code is there, it's likely interesting and has value to programmers,
but it's not a choice if just want to play some chess.
PyChess
PyChess is a gnomebased chessclient written in python. It's GPL and is very much alive as of November 2007.
The goal of PyChess, is to provide a fully featured, nice looking, easy to use chess client for the
gnome-desktop. It has got a rich animated interface, with features such as internetplay over FICS and
supports the xboard cecp engine protocol as well as the uci protocol.

5 responses to “linux games, chess”

I have a problem with the overall premise of your article but I still think its really informative. I really like your other posts. Keep up the great work. If you can add more video and pictures can be much better. Because they help much clear understanding. 🙂 thanks Spurny.